


the beginning

by justbucky



Series: the nicky chronicles [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Boarding School AU, Marauders era, Non magic AU, bc im Garbage tbh tbh, but i cant help myself :(((, i wrote nicky into this, im sorry i know everyone hates that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-19 23:19:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14247951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justbucky/pseuds/justbucky
Summary: they were all the kind of friends who died for one another (and they wouldn't yet have to)





	the beginning

 

For Nicole it starts with Pete, because he gives her bronchitis in fourth hour maths and she’s stuck in the dorms hacking like mad for a full week. Lupin lets her steal his notes because they’re in all the same classes, and because she’s the only one who can read his chaotic writing. In retrospect, it should have been a sign.

In return she promises him a favour (“Anything, honestly”) and weeks pass before he calls her at 10:47 on a Tuesday night because his car’s broken down in the middle of nowhere and he needs to get back to the dorms. So Nicky agrees and rubs her eyes and steals the keys to her older sister’s car because, after all, a promise is a promise.

The middle of nowhere isn’t really an exaggeration, and she offers to call a tow truck, but Remus waves her off - “no need, we can get it tomorrow” - and Nicky barely has time to think  _we?_ before the car is piled full with boys and _her sister is going to kill her_.

One of them (dark hair, beautiful, not that she’d noticed) leaves behind a polka-dotted umbrella on the seat after Nicole drops them at the boys dorm, and when she finds him the next day to return it the conversation goes approximately like this:

“You left your umbr-”

“Velez! Excellent! We’re having a hair competition, you see, between me and Potter, and we need a deciding vote.”

They don’t stop talking long enough for her to answer (it was his, but she would have said Potter without hesitation) and the conversation shifts seamlessly to the viability of selling one’s kidneys to purchase concert tickets. When the five of them reach the dining hall they sit down together without having to discuss it. That’s how it starts.

* * *

 The history of Nicole Amada Serafina Velez: she was, and always had been, a knower of things. She observed people for the sake of it, because it took her a long time to interact instead of spotting and tracking. As far back as she could remember, there were a handful of things she knew for sure to be true. She knew not to ever break a promise. She knew that older siblings liked to feel like they were in charge, and that the younger ones resented it (as far as she could tell, everyone liked to have authority, whether imagined or veritable). She knew she loved to run, and that seemed more of a fact than an opinion. There were many things she was _told_ were true, but the hearing and the believing are a step apart for most people and a world apart for Nicky. She didn’t put stock in seeing to believe either – her motto was knowing to believe, and when you asked Nicole Amada Serafina Velez how she knew something she would shake her head and cross her arms and reply that she just _knew._ She collected facts, useless and useful alike, the way some people collected money or snow globes or shoes.

Nicole had hair that curled wildly and fathomless dark eyes that usually displayed every change in emotion. Her love of truth did not mean that she always told it, but her expressionate face meant that she was very careful about when and where and how she chose to lie. Strategy, that was the name of Nicky’s game. She played chess and ran races and won board games with the same intense focus. When she lost, it was usually because she was playing by a set of rules known only to her. She was secretive but open about that fact, the type who'd rather bluntly say “I’m not gonna tell you” than skirt around the question. She wore exclusively large jumpers in neutral patterns and billowy shirts, interesting pants with pinstripes and high waists and shoes that pushed the box. She was passionate about runway fashion and pockets and the rise of music videos. In short, she was just as layered and complicated as any other human in the world.

Existing in the Velez family was joy and chaos and sometimes suffocating warmth. Her father’s family was from Mexico, though he'd been whisked away to England at only nine, in time to attend Hogwarts for his whole schooling career. Her mother, on the other hand, was native French — the whole nine yards. Madeleine Corbron went to Beauxbatons and worked there for _years_ before being relocated to the equivalent department in London, where her new partner on the job, Angelo Velez, showed her the ropes. They married in under two years. So Nicky and her two brothers and three sisters all grew up speaking spanish to their fathers family and french to their mothers and english to everyone else — veritable trilinguals. The tangled and tumbling state of their speech was almost exactly how they all were as people; that being a hodgepodge put together of French customs and British mannerisms and Mexican culture.

Angelo was a dreamer and an optimist, a man who used words as if they were as easy to weave as yarn. Madeleine was a woman of few words, but she was altogether captured and thrilled by those that belonged to her husband. They were hilarious, a caricature of love, but every ounce genuine. Nina was the oldest, headstrong and intelligent, destined to be a chancellor or prime minister or ruler of a small principality. Nicky was next, only a year behind, the two of them so close that they endlessly butted heads and also trusted each other above all else. Sofie followed, quiet and science-minded and generally excited about things like protozoa and binomial nomenclature. She was the heart of the family, the glue. Behind her, the twins: Marisol and Marco. The two of them were wild-eyed spitfire bundles of the brightest sort of energy, tireless and ceaseless. Marisol wanted more than anything to be Nina when she grew up, while Marco had always been close to Nicky in the way siblings who are far enough apart in age can sometimes be. And then the youngest, the baby of the family, Gabrielle. Gabby sang more than spoke and skipped more than walked, old enough to understand the world but young enough to be unruffled by it. Her default language seemed to be french, which was bizarre, as all the other Velez children thought and spoke in english before all else (after all, it was England). But Gabrielle muttered to herself in her mother’s french, dreamed in the language of the country she had never even seen. This was something nobody seemed quite able to explain.

Angelo spoiled all his kids, not with things but with constant showers of adoration. He was expressive and joyful and open, the type of man who could make a lifelong friend via a two minute chat while waiting at the gas pumps. It was, as those who had witnessed it claimed, like a supernatural gift. There was a guest almost every night at dinner (“Uh, Dad, who is that?” “MY BEST FRIEND CARL, OF COURSE!” “And how do you know Carl?” “Wearing the same shirt in Tesco’s this morning!”) and so the kids grew up with stories from every sort of person, from every walk of life imaginable. It was, perhaps, this that had begun Nicky’s collection of knowing things. She soaked up these talks and stored them in some endless database she alone had access to, staying to hear the strangers ramble long after everyone else had left the table and moved on with the night. They were worldly because of it, all of them. When at twelve Sofie (though not yet Sofie) told the family in a flipping and halting voice that she was, in fact, a girl stuck in the body of a boy, they celebrated the arrival of a daughter. They loved each other. They loved each other in spanish and english and french, in silence and boisterous noise.

* * *

For Sirius it starts like this: it’s sunset and his shift is over, so he goes out to the car park and finds Nicole, sitting on the hood of his car, reading a book while the sun sets the world on fire. And then she’s grinning, pure and wild, but not at him - no, she’s grinning at the page like it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen, like it’s something that could grin back. She’s been sat on his hood hundreds of times, read thousands of books, but that smile hits him like a freight train. When she loans him the book that night in the car, he forgets to pretend he’s above it (he’s always forgetting with her, dangerous). He’s read it nineteen times since that day, looking for her in every word.

 


End file.
